Hey all,

I was just curious if there had been any news for iOS and Android support in LDC. I'm currently working on a first draft for a GSoC proposal and parts of it have to do with Android, iOS, and LDC.

Are they more or less working? Can anyone point me to where I should get started if I want to use those features? If memory serves, there was separate branches for iOS and Android respectively.

And of course, thanks to the awesome LDC team and contributors.

On Friday, 4 March 2016 at 17:01:11 UTC, Jeremy DeHaan wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I was just curious if there had been any news for iOS and Android support in LDC. I'm currently working on a first draft for a GSoC proposal and parts of it have to do with Android, iOS, and LDC.
>
> Are they more or less working? Can anyone point me to where I should get started if I want to use those features? If memory serves, there was separate branches for iOS and Android respectively.
>
> And of course, thanks to the awesome LDC team and contributors.

Hi Jeremy!

The best persons to answer your question are Dan and Joakim. My high-level view is:

- ARM support is now mature
- Android changes from upstream have been merged
- iOS is still being discussed and not yet merged
- Dan is working on ObjC support

Most development work was done on ltsmaster branch and is not yet fully merged into master (which happens hopefully soon).

Regards,
Kai

On Friday, 4 March 2016 at 17:01:11 UTC, Jeremy DeHaan wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I was just curious if there had been any news for iOS and Android support in LDC. I'm currently working on a first draft for a GSoC proposal and parts of it have to do with Android, iOS, and LDC.

Mind sharing what you want to do with mobile?

> Are they more or less working? Can anyone point me to where I should get started if I want to use those features? If memory serves, there was separate branches for iOS and Android respectively.

For a purely native app, Android should work fine as almost all tests pass with all optimizations: only two unit test blocks assert across two modules, core.thread and std.math.  I'm currently trying out JNI, for when you need to call Java-only APIs that Android doesn't make available directly through C, should have something to say about that this weekend.

You should take a look at the wiki to get started with Android:

http://wiki.dlang.org/Build_LDC_for_Android

Even if you don't want to build from source, you can use the instructions on building sample apps there along with the pre-packaged alpha compilers for Android:

https://github.com/joakim-noah/android/releases

Unfortunately, you cannot just use the official ldc release, as there are still modifications to llvm and ldc that have not been merged upstream, while almost all tweaks to druntime and phobos have been merged.  I'll try to get those remaining changes in soon.

Thanks to both of you. As long as they're more or less working, it should be enough for what I want to do.

I maintain DSFML, a binding to SFML which is a multimedia library aimed at video games. Currently, SFML is able to target iOS and Android. One of the items in my proposal is to upgrade parts of the binding and together with LDC this should allow people to easily write games and other multimedia applications for mobile using D.

On Friday, 4 March 2016 at 20:03:43 UTC, Jeremy DeHaan wrote:
> Thanks to both of you. As long as they're more or less working, it should be enough for what I want to do.
>
> I maintain DSFML, a binding to SFML which is a multimedia library aimed at video games. Currently, SFML is able to target iOS and Android. One of the items in my proposal is to upgrade parts of the binding and together with LDC this should allow people to easily write games and other multimedia applications for mobile using D.

Oh nice, hope that works out.

Jeremy DeHaan <dehaan.jeremiah@gmail.com> writes:

> Hey all,
>
> I was just curious if there had been any news for iOS and Android support in LDC. I'm currently working on a first draft for a GSoC proposal and parts of it have to do with Android, iOS, and LDC.
>
> Are they more or less working? Can anyone point me to where I should get started if I want to use those features? If memory serves, there was separate branches for iOS and Android respectively.
>
> And of course, thanks to the awesome LDC team and contributors.

Hi back,

Yes, iOS support is being maintained in an LDC fork right now.  As far as I can it tell, it more or less works.  It would be cool if you can use with it and Joakim's Android version too.

Easiest way to get started is to use the pre-built compiler chain from here:

  https://github.com/smolt/ldc-iphone-dev/releases

Or follow the instructions to build the compiler chain yourself:

  https://github.com/smolt/ldc-iphone-dev/blob/master/README.md

You get a 2.068 based compiler along with phobos.  Once LDC 1.0.0 is released with 2.069 front end, I'll update the iOS fork.

Take a look at the README.md and if you have questions just ask.  I'd very much like to help make your project a success.
-- 
Dan

On Saturday, 5 March 2016 at 05:56:37 UTC, Dan Olson wrote:
> Jeremy DeHaan <dehaan.jeremiah@gmail.com> writes:

> Take a look at the README.md and if you have questions just ask.  I'd very much like to help make your project a success.

I'd love to write some mobile-compatible libraries., and this looks great, but a little out of date now. Did this ever get merged back to LDC? Is that possible? Is there anything I can I do to help get this moving again?

On Thursday, 17 August 2017 at 18:51:55 UTC, Jason Yegge wrote:
> On Saturday, 5 March 2016 at 05:56:37 UTC, Dan Olson wrote:
>> Jeremy DeHaan <dehaan.jeremiah@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Take a look at the README.md and if you have questions just ask.  I'd very much like to help make your project a success.
>
> I'd love to write some mobile-compatible libraries., and this looks great, but a little out of date now. Did this ever get merged back to LDC? Is that possible? Is there anything I can I do to help get this moving again?

No, Dan hasn't had time for it for the last year or so.  He's looking for someone to take over: take a look at his patches if you're interested.

As for Android, it's all merged, the upcoming ldc 1.4 beta will be the first official release to support Android.